“There’s nowhere in the world we don’t want to go. We’d like take this record as far as we can” - hmv.com talks to Wolf Alice

North London indie foursome Wolf Alice unleash their incredible debut album My Love Is Cool today (June 22nd), it’s a fuzzy trip through the best of indie psychdelia and grunge’s finest moments, layer upon layer of guitars, glorious melodies and vocals that will make you swoon over and over again. We sat down with singer/guitarist Ellie Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey to find out how it all came together.

How long did it take you to make My Love Is Cool?

Joff: “It was six weeks in all. We had a week before with Mike (Crossley, producer) to get ready, but it was just six weeks to get it done.”

Did that feel like a lot compared to the way you’d recorded in the past?

Theo: “Yeah, we’re used to being given about 48 hours to get things done, so by the end it felt like a long time.”

Ellie: “It was all week, no weekends, so it was a bit like going to work, just normal hours, nothing too intense.”

Did you try and get most of the sessions done live?

Ellie: “No, there are a few bits. We were looking for the energy of what we do live, but that didn’t extend to how we recorded.”

It’s your debut, so did you arrive with lots of songs written and whittle it down to what’s on the record?

Joff: “Not really, there wasn’t a lot of that. We only made it to 13 songs on the last day of the session.”

Ellie: “There are songs we have that we didn’t get round to working on, but they’re still there, we could well go back to them next time.”

How did you decide what tracks to put on there that you’ve released already? You’ve had two EPs already out there…

Joff: “Only the two ‘Bros’ and ‘Fluffy’ are out there already, we wanted to make sure we don’t disappoint and just give people what they’ve already heard.”

How much of the album have you already road-tested?

Ellie: “I think there’s three or four we’ve barely played life and one we’ve never played, it’ll be fun to try and fit them in now.”

When did you decide on Mike Crossley as your producer? He's worked on some very big records with people like Arctic Monkeys and The 1975?

Theo: “He was suggested to us. Obviously he’s got a great track record and he’s worked on some big records, but he worked really well with us, he was great.”

Are you the kind of band who thinks about producers? Do you have dream producers you’d love to work with?

Joff: “Oh yeah, loads of them.”

Theo: “Some dead.”

Joel: “Quincy Jones, he’d be pretty cool."

How do you sum up the album lyrically?

Ellie: “I don’t think you can completely sum it up lyrically. This is a collection of songs, there’s no tying theme, I guess they are all come from experience. But they’re all really different.”

Is it a purely personal record?

Ellie: “Some of the tracks have been inspired by other people and other people’s experiences, but they’re all very different from each other.”

Where did the title come from and were there any others in contention?

Joel: “There were a few stupid ones, but then there always are.”

Ellie: “That’s the kind of thing you can’t spend too long on, you just end up going round in circles and finding yourself back where you started.”

It’s a lovely cover, where did you find it?

Ellie: “That came from a friend of ours, who toured with us, it’s a image we all saw and I think we for the first time we all liked it. We like how it could be anything, you don’t know that this album is from an indie band, you can’t tell what it’s going to be like.”

You didn’t fancy the band group shot?

Ellie: “If we’d found something cool like that we might have done, but having a piece of art on the front really cements it as a piece of art.”

How much touring do you already have lined up?

Joff: “We’re certainly booked up for the rest of the year, I expect next year will fill up pretty quickly too. There’s nowhere in the world we don’t want to go, we’d like take this record as far as we can.”

Can you see a road to the second album yet? Or is it just too soon?

Ellie: “We’re starting to think about it and starting to get excited about it. We’ve been playing some of these songs for a long, long time, so it’s more for that, we don’t want to end up playing them over and over again, so it’ll be great to have more songs to pick from.”

You’re playing tonight in hmv and signing copies of the album, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever signed?

Ellie: “I signed some abs once.”

Theo: “Not just abs, damn fine abs. And he came back again didn’t he?”

Ellie: “He did, it was a repeat visit.”

Theo: “People seem to like getting the back of their phones signed now, especially the younger fans we have, I always wonder what their parents think, because I know they’re the ones who actually pay for it.”

Joff: “We had this English guy come up to us in America and ask us to sign his passport!”

Joel: “Oh yeah! And we were all like ‘I don’t think we can do, you won’t be able to get home!’.”